Chapter 01 | Echoes of Past Life

The day Matthias Titus turned twenty-eight, nothing remarkable happened.

That was, more or less, the defining fact of his existence. He was not remarkable. He was not exceptional. He was not the kind of man whose name lingered in memory the moment after it was spoken. He kept his desk tidy. He filed his reports on time. He ate the same lunch from the same convenience store three days out of every five. He was, by every measure that the world had devised to assess such things, profoundly, thoroughly ordinary.

At six o'clock in the evening, Matthias Titus boarded the eastbound train home.

He found a seat by the window, wedged between a salaryman half-asleep over his briefcase and a teenager whose headphones were loud enough to be heard as a tinny, rhythmic hiss. The train lurched forward with a familiar groan of steel. Outside, the city unreeled in its usual manner, glass towers catching the last bruised light of the evening, crosswalks full of people whose faces he would never know, a world that moved with the same indifferent momentum it always had.

He loosened his tie a fraction and stared at his own dim reflection in the window.

It started somewhere around the third stop.

A feeling. Not quite a sound, not quite a sight, something anterior to both, seated at the base of his skull like a splinter he couldn't locate. The sense that the space just behind his peripheral vision was occupied. He turned his head. The salaryman. The teenager. A woman scrolling her phone. An old man with a paper bag of groceries balanced on his knees.

Nothing.

Matthias exhaled and turned back to the window. He was tired, he told himself. Work had been long. His mind was manufacturing threats out of air.

But the feeling did not leave. If anything, it sharpened.

He exited two stops before his usual one out of some instinct he chose not to examine too carefully, and walked the rest of the way.

The residential streets of his neighbourhood received him with their customary quiet, soft yellow light from curtained windows, the distant sound of a television, a cat slipping under a fence. He knew this route the way he knew his own handwriting. He had walked it for three years. There was nothing here that should set his nerves on edge.

And yet.

The feeling had not only persisted; it had grown. It had weight to it now, a texture. Something was maintaining a deliberate distance behind him. Something that knew to stay just far enough back to remain invisible, but not quite far enough to disappear entirely, as though it wanted to be sensed, or perhaps could not fully help itself.

Matthias had always had sharper instincts than the situation seemed to call for. His colleagues teased him about it. You always know when the supervisor's coming, they said. He'd never had a good explanation. He'd never tried particularly hard to find one.

He turned left instead of right at the vending machine corner.

Then right instead of left at the park gate.

He doubled back along the service lane behind the dry cleaner's, walked a deliberate loop around the community board that no one ever read, and cut through the narrow shortcut beside the old bicycle shop that most residents didn't know existed.

With each deviation, the presence adjusted. It was good, genuinely good. But he was better, and he couldn't have explained why that was true either.

He emerged into the small plaza near his building, slipped into the shadow of the awning over the closed florist, and waited.

He did not wait long.

A figure rounded the corner, moving carefully, scanning left and right with the focused attention of someone trying to reacquire a trail they'd just lost. The figure was slight. Slight and wrapped head to toe in a long gray cloak, the deep hood pulled forward so that nothing of the face beneath was visible. The cloak was, he noticed, oddly fine, not the rough canvas or cheap synthetic of a prop, but something that moved with a liquid quality, gathering the dark around it in a way that seemed subtly wrong for ordinary cloth.

It stopped in the middle of the plaza. The hooded head turned slowly. Searching.

Matthias stepped out from the awning behind it.

"You can stop now," he said, with the flat patience of a man who had been mildly inconvenienced for the better part of forty minutes. "We've been at this long enough."

The figure startled, startled badly. The cloak swirled as it spun, a foot caught in the hem, and then it sat down very suddenly and very hard on the cobblestones, the hood tumbling back from the impact.

Matthias' next words did not come.

The girl looking up at him from the ground was not what any rational forecast of events had prepared him for.

Her hair was long and the colour of winter sunlight, the pale, luminous gold that did not belong to dye or artifice, that seemed to generate its own faint luminescence in the dim plaza light. Her eyes, wide now with shock and tilted at the corners with something more ancient than surprise, were green. Not the common green of grass or bottle glass, but the deep, saturated emerald of something lit from within, the kind of colour that made every other colour in the vicinity seem slightly less real by comparison. Her skin was pale in the way that fine porcelain was pale, not sickly, not washed out, but unnaturally, geometrically perfect, as though it had been considered and refined past the tolerances that ordinary human faces were made to.

She was, in the bald and insufficient vocabulary available to him, devastating.

She looked up at him. The shock on her face reorganised itself with startling speed. A trace of colour rose at her cheeks. Her expression acquired a quality he could only classify as sheepish, though beneath the sheepishness, like a lamp behind frosted glass, there lurked something unmistakably, warmly amused.

She raised her right hand, index and middle finger extended in a V, and directed it at him with a small, precise tilt of her wrist.

"Master," she said, with the voice of someone who had been waiting a very long time to say exactly that word, "you have caught me." A soft, bright sound escaped her, tee hee, and she closed one luminous eye in a wink.

Matthias stared at her.

"Is this," he said, after a long moment, "a prank."

"No."

"Someone put you up to this. A colleague. Someone from the office." He considered. "Or my cousin. This is the kind of thing my cousin would arrange."

"I was not arranged by anyone." She tilted her head. "And I would appreciate it if you did not look at me as though I were a peculiar insect."

"You were following me for thirty minutes through my neighbourhood in a costume cloak and you called me master," he said. "The insect remark seems a bit..."

"It has been three thousand years." Her voice was still light, still warm, but beneath that warmth was the specific gravity of a statement made by someone who was not, in any sense, joking. "Three thousand years since I last stood before you. I think the word master is the smallest possible beginning."

He was quiet for a beat. "Three thousand years."

"Yes."

"You've been looking for me for three thousand years."

"Yes."

"And you found me. Here. Outside a closed florist in my residential district."

"You are a difficult soul to track across reincarnation cycles," she said, with what sounded like genuine reproach. "The least you could do is not look at me as though I am the strange one."

Matthias pinched the bridge of his nose. He breathed in. He breathed out.

"Get up," he said. "Please. You're sitting on cobblestones."

Something shifted in her expression, a small, unguarded pleasure that was almost immediately tucked away. She gathered the cloak with easy grace and rose to her feet, and Matthias had the disorienting experience of understanding, in one undeniable instant, that the cloak had been obscuring something it had no business obscuring. She reached up and unfastened it at the collar, folded it over one arm, and stood before him in a full-length white dress, simple in cut, a modest U at the neckline, nothing theatrical about it at all. The kind of thing that should have looked unremarkable.

It did not look unremarkable.

Matthias was not, as a rule, a man given to hyperbole. He had never in his life used the phrase put to shame. But looking at her now, standing straight in the yellow light of the plaza, he understood with the cold clarity of arithmetic that the comparison between her and any living person he had ever seen was not a matter of taste or preference. It was a matter of category.

"I am Belial," she said, and there was a formal quality to it, a cadence of ritual, of something recited at the threshold of significant things. "Your servant, my lord. Faithful to you across every age."

"My servant," he repeated.

"Yes."

"I'm an office worker," he said. "I take the train. I eat convenience store lunches. I do not have servants."

"In this life, no," she agreed pleasantly. "But you are not only this life."

"I'm going to be direct with you," Matthias said. "This is very involved and the costuming is impressive, but I am not interested in participating in whatever roleplay scenario this is."

Belial did not appear wounded by this. She appeared, if anything, slightly indulgent, the expression of someone who had anticipated exactly this and had prepared accordingly.

"Let me ask you something, then," she said. "Have you ever noticed, even once, even something you dismissed as coincidence, that you sense things other people don't? That you see clearly in the dark when others are blind? That your body does not tire the way it should, that illness passes through you like weather through an open window, that your endurance is not what an ordinary person's endurance ought to be?"

Matthias did not answer immediately.

He thought of the train tonight, the certainty he'd felt before he'd had any logical basis for certainty. He thought of the night walks he sometimes took at midnight that never left him weary. He thought of the winter three years ago when everyone in the office had been felled by the same flu, one after another, and he had sat at his tidy desk and filed his reports on time, untouched. He thought of a hundred small, quiet anomalies he had filed away under the category of probably nothing, because probably nothing was the most liveable explanation available.

"You know I'm right," Belial said softly.

"Yes," he said. "You're right."

Something in her face opened, briefly, into an expression so relieved and so undefended that he almost looked away from it.

"Your soul is ancient," she said, and her voice had gentled. "Three thousand years ago, you were a lord of great power, a demon lord, in the parlance of that age. You were brought down by three families who united against you: the Cronqvist, the Strauss, and the Marco. Their champions were formidable. In the end..." she paused, and something complicated moved through her eyes "...they were more formidable than you. Your soul was released into the cycle of rebirth. Twenty-eight years ago, in 2026's reckoning, that soul settled here. Into this body. Into Matthias Titus."

The city made its nighttime sounds around them. Somewhere, a train passed on distant tracks.

"That's quite a thing to tell someone outside a florist's on a Thursday," Matthias said.

"I have been practicing the speech for some time," she admitted. "I hoped the location would be less..." she glanced at the shuttered florist "...municipal."

He said nothing. He was looking at his hands. They were the same hands they had always been. Unremarkable. Ordinary. He thought about what she had said, and he thought about what he had always known and never let himself think directly, and the two things fit together in his chest with the precise and unsettling click of a key meeting its lock.

"You said there's more to explain," he said at last.

"A great deal more," Belial said. "Which is why..." she reached behind herself and, with an air of someone producing a very sensible trump card, lifted a cloth grocery bag that had been sitting quietly on the ground throughout the entire conversation "...I was hoping you might allow me to cook for you first. It is easier to receive difficult truths on a full stomach. I took the liberty of gathering ingredients."

He looked at the bag. He looked at her. He looked at the bag again.

"You followed me across the city for half an hour in a cloak," he said, "and stopped to buy groceries."

"Priorities," she said serenely.

The silence stretched. Matthias Titus, who was ordinary, who was bland, who had never once in his twenty-eight years of carefully unremarkable living done anything that would strain the credulity of a reasonable person, Matthias Titus looked up at the night sky above his residential district and tried to imagine what shape the next hour of his life was going to take.

He could not quite manage it.

"Fine," he said.

He turned toward his building.

"The kitchen's on the left when you come in. Don't touch anything on my desk."

Behind him, he heard the soft sound of Belial falling into step, and beneath that, barely audible, the quietly delighted exhale of someone who had been waiting three thousand years for exactly this unremarkable, inevitable moment.